Fear; Bottle caps; Twerking

1.Be afraid. Of that person next to you.2.Sticks and stones may break my bones…but bottle caps will never hurt me.3.It’s called fact checking…

1. Fear. It’s part of us now. I wrote a few weeks ago that I was traveling on 9/11. The trip went off without a hitch and I have to commend the airport on how smoothly security went. One thing I did notice though is the TSA agent was reminding everyone to put your wallet in your bag, not one of the baskets, when it goes through the x-ray machine. The agent went on to tell people that your shoe is not a safe place either. I was thinking to myself that it reminded me of that Seinfeld bit where he talks about the shoe as a high tech security system when you’re at the beach (“Yea, I’ll put it in my shoe…no one will ever think to look there!”).

But then things got serious – the agent said ‘hey, that bad person next to you can take it out of the basket a lot easier than they can your bag.’

What? The bad person next to me? This is what we’re saying? On 9/11?

I thought that was a little extreme. Does that mean I’m the bad person for the person to my left or right? I didn’t think too much more about it until the next day when my daughter was telling me that part of her new school lockdown protocol is to throw things at the ‘bad person’ coming into the classroom instead of huddling in the corner. I said ‘oh, ok; well, why is huddling in the corner a bad thing?’ She said ‘because we will be easy targets.’

Yea, let that sink in. This is the reality we’re dealing with today. Kids are being raised to know there are ‘bad people’ out there. One that can come into their classroom. One that might be standing next to them in line at the airport. I don’t know how I feel about it. Just because it’s not warm and fuzzy doesn’t mean we should turn our back on it…but at the same time this new reality makes me sad.

The campaign has been pulled and Coca Cola dealt with the issue immediately, issuing an apology to the family and making a donation to the Canadian Easter Seals and United Way.

It’s a great example of how a company should deal with a crisis. 1.) Admit you’re wrong; 2.) Say you’re sorry; 3.) Fix it.

As for quality control…that’s a different story. I’m not sure how this campaign wasn’t vetted first and how the process was so random (Coca Cola said it was a random process that pulled words). The details matter, especially in programs like this.

3. I’ve Ben thinking…by now you’ve seen the greatest twerking fail video on YouTube (the girl who catches herself on fire). And by now you’ve seen that it was a hoax, courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel.

We all fell for this video. Everyone thought it was hilarious. Even several news outlets picked it up. The girl in the video was actually a stunt woman who kept the secret, even when her friends recognized her and tried to contact her to see if she was ok.

To me this is a little disturbing. The fact that several news outlets picked this up and covered it as ‘news’…but the person wasn’t real. It makes me wonder why not one reporter or news source tried to confirm that the person in the video was who she said she was. Was it just assumed? Is this story protected from any fact checking because it was on social media? There are so many news stories that originate from tweets or YouTube videos. The fact that these may or may not be fact checked is a little unsettling.